Not sure if this is related but earlier this week the laptop encountered a problem installing a windows update.

What is happen is is the laptop is saying no wireless connections are available and has a x over the wifi Icon on the task bar. I have reset the router and it seems to be working fine. 3 phones, a iPad, kindle and another laptop can connect to it and show all bars.

The wifi is turned in on the laptop. Hitting the switch to turn it off does not change the wifi icon to disabled which concerns me. The wifi light on the keyboard does turn off. Turning it back on results in the same no networks available.

I have tried rolling back the driver, uninstalling the driver and reinstalling it. I have also restored windows to a restore point prior to the failed wi dies update.

None of this has made a difference

It is a atheros wireless adaptor. I saw there was another device fir a Microsoft debugger wireless network, not knowing what that was or if that could be the issue I uninstalled that. No luck. Same issue.

Anyone have any other ideas what it could be or what else to try? Thanks.

Are the quicklaunch buttons that turn the wifi on and off working for other things such as brightness etc? (Usually hitting the Fn key + one of the F keys)

There is no hardware switch on the side of the laptop that turns wifi on and off either?

You can't goto device manager and right click > enable the adapter?

As above but in network connections?

Yes, all other quick launch buttons work.

In device manager it shows the adapter as enabled.

On this particular acre laptop. The wifi button is a key/ button left of the tab icon. There is also a email, web, and games button. When wifi is enabled the button has a back light. This is the only button / switch.

I think I would grab a live Linux distro and boot from the CD/DVD (or install windows on a separate partition) to check the hardware is still working fine, least it will 100% narrow it down to a windows/driver issue

I think I would grab a live Linux distro and boot from the CD/DVD (or install windows on a separate partition) to check the hardware is still working fine, least it will 100% narrow it down to a windows/driver issue

How big of a file are we talking for this. We are on a Hughes net satellite I telnet service which limits daily bandwidth to 250mb with a hard cap. Sounds like a good idea to try.

Well. I tried dsl just for the hell of it and it says no wireless network card found so I am going to take that as meaning it doesn't have the driver? Can the specific driver be added to it as I installed on a USB pen drive?

I don't have any experience with DSL in particular, but atheros chips should work out of the box in most linux distros, since they are supported by the open source kernel drivers so they generally don't need drivers to be manually installed.

EDIT: DSL has an ancient kernel (version 2.4.x). Atheros support was added to the linux kernel in version 2.6.35. You would need a distro with a newer kernel.